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4 votes
2 answers
1k views

Can the two biggest bitcoin mining pools lock out all others?

I just noticed that the two biggest bitcoin mining pools already have more than 52.5% of the hashing power (as of 11/12/23 Foundry USA had 27,7% and AntPool 24.88%) and am wondering about the ...
Dr. Hans-Peter Störr's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
346 views

Is it possible to mine bitcoin in a trustless way with a Pool?

Some context As far as I understand there are two ways in which an individual (or a company) can mine Bitcoin: Solo: if one has enough hashrate to secure a block often enough to pay for the ...
Lagrang3's user avatar
  • 150
1 vote
1 answer
134 views

Bitcoin Mining Pools Centralization

I read a couple of articles and watched some YouTube videos, but couldn't find a super convincing argument for why centralized mining pools are not a huge issue. I get that from a Game Theory ...
xor's user avatar
  • 97
2 votes
1 answer
452 views

How does stratum v2 work?

I want to know how much independence miners have when they join a pool. Do the individual miners create the block headers and choose which transactions to include in their block or is the block just ...
Marco's user avatar
  • 395
3 votes
0 answers
48 views

Mining with multiple pools

Miners pool their hashpower together to reduce payout variance. The larger the pool, the lower the variance, which unfortunately incentivizes centralization. Today, over 50% of the total hashrate is ...
Vojtěch Strnad's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
82 views

Does spy mining negate the harm caused by big blocks on decentralization?

In the question Do larger blocks make it harder for smaller miners to compete? Why? there are some reasons given for why larger blocks hurt smaller pools. Is this still the case with spy mining? Spy ...
MCCCS's user avatar
  • 10.2k
0 votes
2 answers
177 views

What are the chances bitcoin big mining pools to unite and do 51% attack?

Looking at this bitcoin hash rate distribution chart (https://www.blockchain.com/en/pools), it only takes 3-4 mining pools to unite and do a 51% attack. With this possibility, how can people still ...
bbnn's user avatar
  • 247
1 vote
2 answers
231 views

Is it possible to get rid of mining pools and therefore get a truly decentralized bitcoin?

There are some criticism that PoW of bitcoin and ethereum protocol suffers from the centralization of mining pools, and dPos such as EOS claimed to be more decentralized in practice than bitcoin and ...
an offer can't refuse's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
138 views

Are Bitcoin and Ethereum really de-centralized? Or is federated a better term?

By looking at the bitcoin and ethereum mining pool hashrate distribution I feel that only 5-10 relevant full nodes exist. So it's more like a federated system among those. Am I seeing something wrong ...
Romeo Kienzler's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
359 views

Is Bitcoin centralized by mining pools?

Before going to my question, I want to make sure the difference between a full node and a miner. Below definition might be too simple, but it is enough to ask my question. A full node is to store ...
ogw_yuya's user avatar
  • 635
0 votes
2 answers
72 views

Assumed, I hash the next bitcoin block. Whom do I tell if it's decentralized?

The bitcoin network is decentralized, right? Assumed, I do hash a little bit and get a hash that starts with 20 Zeros.. What do I do than? I need to send the block to someone but who is that? It's ...
hardfork's user avatar
  • 2,127
0 votes
1 answer
33 views

Where to find the data to compare the decentralisation of mining for different cryptos?

I'd like to compare the centralisation of BTC's mining / nodes / pools for BTC and other alts. Where can data be found on this? Thank you! David
David's user avatar
  • 337
0 votes
2 answers
102 views

Bitcoin - not so democratic future? [closed]

Bitcoin's goal is a decentralized democratic value system. But miners and platforms are already consolidating into bigger more powerful entities. What's to stop it? I feel a crypto will only be ...
Bischoin's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
156 views

What is the trend in Mining Pools?

According to Greg Maxwell mining pool consolidation had reached the point of 22 large pools, as of the Bitcoin FDTN. conf. Nov. 2015. What is the state of the current situation? Has there been a ...
jmwSeattle's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
465 views

Does Stratum cause mining to be more centralized than getBlockTemplate would?

I read the question "I don't understand the "51% attack" problem. Why does a mining pool have power with a 51% share?" and its anwers. That made me wonder that since the GBT protocol is ...
Gary Chen's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
542 views

Are the bitcoin miners decreasing in quantity and increasing in size?

From what I am learning about bitcoin, the mining process is becoming exponentially difficult and hence exponentially more expensive (or at least more expensive), as people need more physical ...
Newskooler's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
210 views

Are there any complete Bitcoin systems?

It seems to me that to keep Bitcoin both decentralized and secure, the whole of the Bitcoin process should ultimately depend on each user, or rather, that the involvement of each user should ...
user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
164 views

Is Bitcoin still uncontrolled with all those mining pools?

It is always stated that Bitcoin is uncontrolled and it does not make sense to cheat and double-spend because you will need more computing power than everyone else combined. Isn't that changed with ...
Andrey's user avatar
  • 1
1 vote
1 answer
228 views

Is multi-PPS the correct solution to the mining centralization problem?

See this post. Meni believes that this could be the correct solution to the mining pool centralization problem, and that are no known drawbacks. There is some work that needs to be done to write, test ...
ripper234's user avatar
  • 26.6k
5 votes
1 answer
172 views

Incentive for mining by regular users

Most of the time that a regular user gets introduced to the concept of mining, they're immediately non-incentivized by the community and also by the high-cost of hardware compared to the actual reward....
Luca Matteis's user avatar
  • 5,242
1 vote
2 answers
340 views

Would a professional ASIC-machine holder eventually become a bank-like character?

As we know, one of the concepts of Bitcoin is to be "decentralized". When individual miners, even with ASIC miners, become unprofitable, will the system become more centralized to those several superb ...
Wonkia's user avatar
  • 11
14 votes
1 answer
8k views

What is the P2Pool?

As I was checking this SE, it doesn't appear this important question has been asked: What is the P2Pool? How does differ from the traditional approach and what does it offer its users?
ThePiachu's user avatar
  • 43.2k
35 votes
2 answers
3k views

Do mining pools centralize the Bitcoin network and make it less secure?

A mining pool with a significant percentage of the hash rate could allow double spend attacks by the pool manager. There are a number of pools that approach this level. However, most people say that a ...
Joshua Kolden's user avatar